Library Thing Early Reviewers Book Review: In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler

I just received this early reviewer book this afternoon, was home with a bad headache and read Ensler's book in a matter of a few hours. It cast light on my own family relations beyond all else this book does. Contrary to its subject matter, it is not a depressing book.

Relationships, communicating with one’s body, facing life and death, defining love in its many forms, giving to the earth and its people more than one takes away. This is, in summary, what Eve Ensler expresses in her book, ‘In the Body of the World’. Ensler talks about her experience, her relationship, with cancer and chemo with wry wit, and candor.

In exploring and courageously sharing her raw and life changing experience of surgeries, ports, chemo, and all their emotional and physical side effects, Ensler emboldens others to find their own way, but encourages us to be bold enough to feel, to love, to name, to cry, and to believe that others are there for us. Ensler carries us through with beautiful metaphors and honesty about the facing and fearing death. At one point, her mother, also ill, tells Eve that “I dreamed they are came to take our hearts. They didn’t want mine. They wanted yours the most”...The next morning they move my mother to the cardiac unit because her heart has now become the problem. It is where we do not live that the dying comes.”

sh 4/201

AFTER VISITING FRIENDS - Book review for LibraryThing.com/ early book reviews

Michael Hainey’s appreciation of a good story becomes apparent from the very first chapter - and I was hooked. He set the foundation of trust and spirit of understanding on which his search for the truth of his father’s death would be built. He searched and questioned with a deep if not completely clear understanding of the human mind and heart. Relationships have often been likened to quilts and tapestries. Considering the generations and cultures in the makeup of Michael’s family, I will glom onto the quilt concept; the quilt that rashly combines silks and denims; fragile, thin cottons and aged sateens that occasionally catch the light and reveal an original radiance. Stitches of aging thread that provide varying degrees of tension between the equally aging pieces.

Michael makes the reader privvy to the grandson/grandmother/mother relationships; the shared stories and observations of family quirks; factual comments casually dropped by the grandmother; the wariness tempered by respectful tenderness in the mother/son relationship. How does one sift out the facts and truth in a history that that has been somewhat distorted by people protecting their own?  Does the truth even hold the same power after being buried for decades? When we find the truth, we may have simply uncovered new truths...with the real truth revealed in the tensions we were afraid to face. Michael’s father had his demons. He was a man with a passion for his job, and an inner torment he could face only in living a facade. In the end, perhaps the real hero is the person who knew of the demons and kept them at bay from the children.

I couldn’t put this book down until I was done...and even then it haunted me.

sh 2/2013